Ravens HC Takes Responsibility for Miscommunication on Free Kick Fair Catch

Head Coach John Harbaugh took responsibility and further explained a late-game fair catch that proved costly during Sunday’s overtime loss to the Colts.

The Ravens held a 19-16 lead after Colts quarterback Gardner Minshew stepped out of the back of the end zone for a safety, with the game clock showing 1:56 left in regulation.

The Ravens originally instructed Zay Flowers to fair catch the ensuing free kick, which he did. However, before the kick, the scoreboard clock was switched to 2:03. Flowers stopped the clock from starting with his fair catch, giving the Colts essentially a free timeout with the two-minute warning.

The Ravens went three-and-out and took just 15 seconds off the clock also because of a third-down penalty that stopped the clock.

That left the Colts with more than enough time to drive for a game-tying field goal, sending the game into overtime where the Colts prevailed.

Had Flowers run three seconds off the clock to get to the two-minute warning, the Ravens could have run the ball three times and, at worst, punted back to the Colts with less than 30 seconds left and no timeouts. Asked about that sequence during his Monday press conference, Harbaugh put the blame on himself and a lack of communication.

“We’ll take responsibility for that,” Harbaugh said. “In the confusion of all that, it was chaotic. … We made the determination that we were going to fair catch everything.

We were looking at an onside kick, pop-up kick, those kind of things (for the Colts) to try to get the ball back.

“We did not do the job we needed to do to communicate to our guys after the change was made – once they were on the field – that [the clock] changed. We might have thought we did; that’s the way it goes in communication. So, we just have to do a better job communicating.”

“I think communication is the basis for everything, especially in football, especially in the heat of battle – finding a way to communicate clearly – and we just didn’t get that done.”

“I’ll take responsibility for that. We’ve just got to be better at that. That should not have been a fair catch. We knew it, and we didn’t get the word to Zay [Flowers] like we needed to.”

Harbaugh said another helpful option would have been to call timeout before the Colts’ free kick. That would have given Baltimore more time to finalize its strategy and make sure everyone was on the same page. “Looking back at it, right away afterward, I think we all said to ourselves, ‘We should have called timeout,'” Harbaugh said.

“Looking back on it in hindsight, we should’ve called timeout. We would’ve made it more clear. I know we’ll learn from that.

“It’s not anybody’s fault but ours. We didn’t understand quick enough that it was going to be over two minutes left when the ball was kicked. By the time we did, we didn’t get thing communicated like we needed to the guys out there. That’s on us. That’s on us 100%. [We] take full responsibility for it. I’ll take full responsibility for it.”